I told Bess what Adam said, and she paid me the hundred and twenty dollars right on the spot, and then insisted on opening the incubator at the regular time for the ten minutes the book directs, to cool off the eggs night and morning, and putting her monogram on six of the eggs.  To do this she decided to stay all night, and telephoned her maid, Annette, to pack her bag and let Matthew bring it out to her when he came to help Polly Corn-tassel put their first batch of eggs into their incubator.  Matthew had bought twenty hens and two nice brotherly roosters, and they had almost caught up with me in the number of their brown babies on the whole shells.  Matthew had been coming out night and morning ever since he had brought out his and the Beesleys’ poultry and had either had supper with us at Elmnest or we had both got riz biscuits and peach preserves and chicken fried with Aunt Mary and Uncle Silas and Polly and Bud.  I had subjugated Rufus into cooking a few canned things, for which I had traded one of his pig jaws at the bank-post-office-grocery emporium, and Uncle Silas had thrown in a few potatoes, and Adam had brought me a great bag of white beans from across Paradise Ridge, so the diet at Elmnest had changed slightly.  The absorbed twins had never noticed it at all; only they displayed more hearty vigor in attacking the problems of literature and history that absorbed them.  Also almost every day Pan brought me young green things that were sprouting in the woods, and I cooked them for him in an old iron pot down by the spring-house and had supper with him.

“Those two dears are the most precious old Rips I ever beheld,” said Bess when we had retired to my room after supper on the fateful night of our near tragedy.  “You are so fortunate, Ann, to have two delicious fathers in name only.  Mine pokes into my business at all angles and insists on so much attention from me that I don’t know how I’ll amount to anything in this world.  He says it takes a very fine and brainy woman to earn about ten thousand dollars a year being affectionate and agreeable to her own father, and that I get so much because there is no possible competition as I am an only child, but all the same it looks like unearned money to me.  Just wait until those six little chickens begin to earn me a hundred dollars a month like my book guarantees they will do in their second year; then I’m going to show dad just how much I love him for himself and give him back my bank-book.”

“Still it is an awful lot of work, Bess,” I remonstrated feebly, because I knew that I couldn’t have made myself believe all I had learned in just two months at Elmnest the day I started in business.